Kenny Malone

This is Planet Money from NPR.

A case in point, a huge meeting last week at the White House.

But Trump appeared to be looking out into the crowd for one company in particular.

Where's Chevron, he asks.

Chevron was there when that oil money transformed Venezuela into the first petrostate and transformed Caracas into a gilded global capital.

And so in that White House room full of the most powerful oil executives on the planet, Trump singled out Chevron's executives.

Pretty sure Chevron did make money and are pretty well positioned to keep making it.

Hello and welcome to Planet Money.

I'm Kenny Malone.

Today on the show, before Saudi Arabia, before Iran, there was Venezuela, the first petrostate, the first country whose entire economy became dependent on oil.

And with that blessing, an entire economic textbook of complications opened up, from the Dutch disease to the resource curse to mono-economic vulnerability.

Yeah, even if they got seated pretty far from the president at the White House.

The economic history of Chevron in Venezuela.

The OG Petro State after the break.

So you had all those oil executives at the White House talking about Venezuelan oil and not all that excited, except for Chevron.

Venezuelan oil was discovered more than 100 years ago at Lake Maracaibo, which actually happens to be the same lake that inspired Italian explorer Americo Vespucci to give Venezuela its name.

I was going to ask, should we guess?

Erica, you want to guess?

But not for long.

This is a time in the world where there are European and American explorers and botanists and geologists all over the Americas looking for something on land or in the ground that might make them rich.